Montreal Launches Cigarette Butt Recycling Pilot

SAESEM claims to have already redirected 10,000 butts a week from going onto the streets and into city sewers, and says it can double the number by March, when the pilot project ends.

"Beyond the numbers, it's about all the butts that are not staying on our streets," said Raphael Nguyen, project development coordinator for SAESEM.

Here's how it works: every week SAESEM collects the butts from the bins and ships them to TerraCycle, a company near Toronto that does the recycling.

There, paper, ash and tobacco get turned into compost while the plastic in the filters gets mixed with other recycled plastic and made into new products.